To start with for £100 you do get a nice selection of goodies in the box, as well as two DVI to analogue adaptors you get the aforementioned DVI to HDMI connector, which will be handy for those who own HD LCD TV's and want to display images on a larger screen (especially as the card supports a max external resolution of 2560 x 1600).

Also included is a HDTV out cable, Never Winter Nights 2 game and a Crossfire bridge connector, for linking up two cards in SLI style fashion.

Specification of the card is interesting indeed, though it has 256MB GDDR4 SDRAM and a 128-bit interface - which shows its budget nature - it is blessed with some relatively high clock speeds, the GPU runs at 800Mhz and the memory at 1100Mhz, this and the 120 stream processing units helps the card post some respectable scores in our benchmarks, however as we will mention later on, games in reality do not run as good as Gigabytes own 8600GT card we reviewed a few months ago.

Here is the full spec

• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GPU
• Supports PCI Express and 120 stream processing units
• Microsoft DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.0 support
• Integrated with the industry's best 256MB GDDR4 memory and 128-bit memory interface
• Supports native CrossFire, Avivo HD video and display technology
• Features dual DVI-I / D-sub (by adapter) / HDTV /
• Supports Dual Dual-link @ high resolution up to dual 2560x1600
• HDMI(by adapter) and 5.1 surround audio

For benchmarking we used HardwareOC Quake4 and Prey (Quake4 results posted in the gallery) and 3DMark 06, the latter had to be adjusted slightly as when we ran the benchmark the system would hang, this is because it had difficulty detecting the clock speed of the card.

To fix the hanging problem (if you decide to benchmark the card yourself) you need to head to Windows/System32/Futuremark/MSC and inside here rename the Direcpll.dll file to Direccpll_.dll and this should work.

As you can see from the gallery the 3DMark 06 scores have come out quite well thanks to its higher clock speeds.

For a more natural test we ran a Company of Heroes (COH) benchmark and it posted a reasonable score of 47fps at 1280 x 1024 but as you can see this is without any AA or AF settings.

However when we played games like BF2 and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (which the latter could only run at 800 x600) the card struggled unless we turned down certain settings to medium or low and of course without using any AA or AF, we know our Test PC is not the most power fullest of machines but none the less we could tell straight away that the card was not performing.

And we also noticed with Vegas that it paused for a long time before loading the main menu - like the 3D Mark 06 software - so older games may also have problems detecting the clock speed of the card.

To help with the above performance issues we took advantage of ATI's Overdrive system which will push the cards clock speeds up for you automatically and monitor the card so it doesn’t go pear shaped, but we could only set the cards limit to 857Mhz GPU and 1179Mhz. We would not recommend manually over-clocking over these settings as the card gets pretty hot, so over-clocking helps to a certain degree but not by much.

Saying this the ATI 2600XT is not a bad card at all, like most budget cards if you can live with playing games at lower res and settings then this is fine, its image quality is excellent, with colours being sharp and vibrant. Plus you do get the advantage of the DVI to HDMI port and DX10 support.

Note: The card was tested using our TestPC - link is in the above text.